Fading Fast Like A Wind Or A Time
by nothing-rhymes-with-ianto
Summary: He wonders what would have happened if he'd raised her differently. But he has no air and she's pushing him into the dark and there's nothing he can do.


_Written for the "asphyxiation" square of angst_bingo. Suzie's father's name was nabbed from sariagray's This Is My Letter To The World That Never Wrote To Me._

* * *

"Dad?" The voice that calls to him is distant and strange. It's familiar. He is both intrigued and terrified, as it is a sound he has not heard in so long. "Dad, wake up. It's me." It's not a dream, and he opens his eyes to meet the hardened, furious gaze of the girl he hasn't seen in years, the same wild, angry eyes when she left before. He knows there's only one reason he'd come back to find him. "Dad, it's me, Suzie. Hello, Dad."

And then he can't breathe. Everything is a wild blur of colours and lights and he can't get any air and Suzie's tearful voice is ringing in his mind like a skipping record—

The record is skipping. It's skipping and skipping so that Usha Uthup sings the same line again and again and the little girl is laughing while his ears and brain burn with annoyance.

"Susita!" He snaps. "Turn that off! Now!"

Blessed silence descends upon the house. There is silence from the girl in the other room as well. He feels like he can breathe again now that the jaw-clenchingly irritating noise is gone.

Jishnu wonders how he managed to conceive a daughter so unlike him. She's adventurous and outspoken in a way that makes him cringe when she's in public with him. She's seven years old. He wonders how bad it's going to get when she's older.

Susita is nine when Jishnu enters his study to find her standing on her tiptoes on a chair, reaching for a book on the top of his bookshelf.

"What are you doing?"

"I want to read, Papa!"

But Jishnu can only think of the future, can only imagine Susita with knowledge, can only see ahead of him a stubborn girl who will not marry, who will not listen, who will not do anything she is told.

"Get down from there, now!"

"But Papa!"

"I said, get down."

Instead of climbing dutifully down, Susita snatches a book off the shelf and jumps onto the floor. Insolent _choti lurki_, he thinks, glaring as she sits in the chair and opens the book. He slaps it out of her hands and she jumps.

"Get out of here, child. Go!"

She glares up at him for a moment and his hand twitches toward her, palm open. She bolts, slamming the door to the study so it rattles in its frame. He can hear her little feet pounding to her room, and then her own bedroom door slams.

Susita watches her father laid up in bed with pneumonia. She was told not to go in his room, but she does anyway. She stands in the doorway and watches him cough and wheeze as he struggles to bring air into his lungs. She watches as he tries to take a deep breath and stops halfway as if he's forgotten how. It's been three months since he shouted her out of his study. She stands like a messy-haired, barefooted statue in the doorway and watches him lose air.

Susita's thirteen when her mum is killed in a car accident, and Jishnu can feel himself sliding into despair. He doesn't know how to raise a girl. He'd always wanted a _son_, he was ready for a son. Instead he got her. And she is nothing like any girl he's ever known. She won't listen to him, she won't do a thing he says. She's meant to obey him, like a good girl should. Instead she looks at him with eyes that are far too sharp, expression far too calculating, and says nothing.

When she tries to talk him into or out of something, when she begins to question the world around her at a rapid rate, he tells her off. He holds her ability to learn on a tight leash. Most families he knows want an intelligent daughter to raise intelligent sons, but he knows for a fact that Susita will do no such thing if she is allowed to properly learn here. He hides books from her, hides knowledge from that piercing dark glare. And still she learns.

They move to London when Susita is twelve, and she becomes Suzie. She quickly learns to hide her native accent under an impeccable English one and Jishnu is furious that she wants to hide herself like this.

"Why are you doing this?" He asks her. "Why are you hiding your accent, your name, me?"

"The kids at school will laugh," Susita answers angrily. "If I'm different like that, they'll laugh. They won't take me seriously. They won't value what I say or what I know."

"You shouldn't be taken seriously," Jishnu replies. "You should be making a happy husband and a happy home with sons."

Susita glares at him with glinting eyes and goes off to her room. She doesn't come out for the rest of the night, and rock n' roll blares out from under the door. Three days later, Jishnu goes into Susita's bedroom and looks around. When he finds out she's been hiding books from him, it's the first time he's ever hit her. She says nothing to him, silence glaring at him with a bruised face and the sound of the smack echoing through the house.

Suzie watches her father take up smoking. He says it's because of her. Says it's because she makes him stressed and stiff. Part of her knows it is, but most of her knows it's because everyone else in London smokes, and despite what he says, Jishnu wants to fit in. He wants to feel respected. She watches him choke his way through a pack every two weeks, then a pack a week, then a pack a day. His face is clouded by smoke and by now there's no way she can get through to him.

Sixteen years old. It's when most people start experimenting. It's when they come into their own, form their own opinions. Suzie's had most of her own opinions for years. It's the experimenting that's new. She likes kissing. It's nice; it feels nice. She hasn't done it much, and she's never made out with a boy like this, but discovering and learning are her passion, so she wraps her arms around his neck and kisses him some more.

Jishnu watches from the window as Susita kisses some strange boy in a car. He feels anger welling up in him; anger at her exploration, at the fact that he knows she will push against him in everything now.

"You are not allowed to see him again," He barks as she walks through the door.

"What?" She lets it fall closed and it bangs loudly in the frame.

"You cannot see him again. I forbid it."

"You can't _forbid_ me from doing anything." Susita scoffs. "I'll do it on my own if I like."

Jishnu pulls himself up to his full height and raises a threatening hand. His voice is like thunder. "I forbid you to see him."

For a moment he sees a flash of fear, but it's quickly covered up and she cocks her head at him and sneers before brushing past him to her bedroom.

He doesn't see the boy again, but Susita comes home with bruises on her neck and swollen lips and Jishnu knows.

Jishnu's job transfers him to Cardiff, and as soon as he's finished moving them in and settling into routine, he can feel Susita falling away from him. Her school friends are showing her things he never wanted her to know or see or think of, and she is sharp and curious on her own.

When she tells him she no longer believes in a god of any sort, or religion, that she'd rather focus on science, realism, the fact that nothing exists but this single plane and our own vast universe, that she doesn't want to marry because learning is far more important, he loses the control he's been trying to keep tightly reined for so many years.

"I was meant to raise a daughter to be a good wife!" he rages. He points an accusing finger at her. "You are my life's failure. You were supposed to be the right kind of woman."

"I am my own woman!" Suzie screams back. "I have a job. You didn't even know about it. That's where I go every day. That's why I'm late home."

"Have you become a whore?" There is quiet fury in his voice.

"I'm an assistant technician at the scientific labs. It's called The Pharm. I'm also learning computer science from a coworker. Programming, those things. It's easy. I got accepted to university, too. _Most_ parents would be proud."

"You were supposed to be a good wife, not this. If only I'd had a son."

"You were trying to keep me from getting educated, and you think I would make a good wife?"

"I knew what you would become."

"What, smart? Able to think for myself?"

"I had to keep you ignorant, Susita, or you would have defied me."

He raises a hand to hit her, to keep her in line the only other way that he knows how now that his words no longer work. She doesn't flinch, or back away. Her eyes look crazed, bright glinting black like polished stones. She raises a fist and lunges, punching him and he feels his head snap back, dizzy and reeling. She steps away, calming shaking out her hand.

"It's Suzie," She snaps, eyes wild. "And here I am, defying you."

The slam of the front door rings in his ears for days. Her angry voice reels in his head. Her wild eyes haunt him.

Seven years later, Suzie is not long working for the Pharm. She's working as a programmer in one job and a forensics technician in another. She's happy like this. Most people would be stressed and going out of their minds with her work schedule, but she loves it. It's what she wants to do with her life.

She gets a call when she gets home from work and picks up the phone as she picks through the post.

"Hello?"

"Susita." The voice makes her freeze, her fingers halfway through opening a letter. "I'd like to see you again. I want to talk with you again."

"Why?" She asks, immediately on the defensive.

"I have cancer. Lung cancer. The doctors just confirmed."

Hatred bubbles up out of her, memories of hands and locked doors and angry eyes and words and forced ignorance. The fact that he'd wanted _anything_ but her. That he'd tried to kill her mind.

"Good," she snarls. "You deserve it. Don't call me here again."

She slams the phone down and breathes for a while, shoving all the memories of her father's abuse down and away. Then she continues to sort through the post, trying to ignore the angry roiling in her belly, the crazed pulsing she can feel in her brain. There's nothing left for her with him, and she'd like nothing more than to send him to the hell he deserves.

He stares up into the wild eyes and gasps for air, fear clutching at him as he feels the darkness descending. His world has shrunk to the sound of Susita's voice and the feeling of his lungs screaming for air, his throat unable to work, shrinking, aching, and he can't catch a breath.

"That's worth coming back for," Susita's voice says distantly. "Sending him into the dark. Just what the bastard deserves."

He wonders, then, what would have happened if he'd raised her differently. If he'd let her live the way she wanted and supported her life. What would have happened if he'd given her the books she wanted, if he'd held back his hands and his anger. But there's no air left, and no time, and it's all over now. He has no way to go back, and she's staring down at him with angry, shameful black eyes full of crazed hatred. He knows he deserves to go down where she's sending him for the way he treated her. But there's nothing he can do. He has no air and she's pushing him into the dark and there's nothing to do but regret and embrace the suffocating black he can feel so close. Her hateful black eyes are the last thing he sees.


End file.
